Or bath. Douglas Adams endorsed baths for such purposes!
I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to sort out our thinking in new areas (from the French word essayer).
150 karma · joined November 5, 2019
I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to sort out our thinking in new areas (from the French word essayer).
Happily it's available now and it's called intuition. If something is boring then avoid; if something is exciting then pursue.
Problems being that it's purely anecdotal and you have to know and trust yourself. If you're too attracted to prestige, money or job security then it's going to return a distorted signal. Which is why organised science is now bureaucratic and slow despite the fact that there are more scientists than ever before.
We can imagine and create new things but their attributes are always recombinations of the attributes of old things we already know about.
>you would need some state in order to build such an inner world
This feels a bit like essentialism to me. As far as I'm concerned I just am that inner world. It is built from my memories and experiences.
It is true that the inner world is in a particular state at any given time. But it's not made out of some kind of 'state-iness' stuff, any more than a brick is built out of 'brickiness'. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
>is there simply a feeling of existence?
I don't think there's a feeling of existence per se. However one does with experience become aware of subtle sensations from the body at rest, for example noise in the optical system (static or 'snow'). One can then dream or imagine or think about these things too.
No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. Then it might be capable of consciousness, IDK. But being so capable it would then be a person rather than just an app.
Edit: it can't truthfully think, "I see a pebble."
It is animism, the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive things only indirectly, via our mental representations of them. We (our minds) live in an inner, virtual, world. It matches the outer world only partially. The match is limited by matters such as how rational we are, how much we know, how much our culture knows, what our misconceptions and mistakes are, and so on. All very much in line with Karl Popper's epistemology.
Our mental representations are alive in the sense that they are labile and interconnected in all sorts of ways that make up our worldview. Creative geniuses don't consider their tools dispassionately. They literally relate to them, e.g. a certain equation might be like an old friend.
The problem for the animists is that just because things (trees, rocks, equations) are connected in our minds does not imply they are connected in the real, external universe. There aren't spirits 'out there'. If there is a spirit, it's 'in here' working behind the scene. It's the operation of our own brain. So primitive cultures had a very limited knowledge of how the outer physical world worked outside of necessary activities such as hunting. Scientific knowledge came later.
Materialists, on the other hand, i.e. most of us nowadays, assume that they perceive external physical reality directly. They forget they had to spend months just learning to see things when they were babies. (Or that this process was more about sorting out what was what than about building a telescope.) They assume that objects are are unconnected, like atoms in a void. This is of course true on the wider physical level but merely self-fulfilling in the inner world. Thus their mental representations of things (not us) remain relatively dormant. They never hear the 'wind in the willows' and never realise their full creative power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg
Near the end it provides an answer to OP's question 'What's the most important modern simple invention?' although whether this in fact would be Burke's answer, I don't know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how an institution could be turned from an exam factory into something a bit closer to a child's bedroom and computer at home, i.e. to a place of play.
For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. At university one is effectively granted permission to do 'curiosity-led' research by an external grant agency.
So what does institutionalised play look like? Perhaps something like a university. Yet how much could university life be said to be 'following the fun'?
So it's perhaps not so surprising that large 'communities' which are full of strangers and where membership is optional are subject to very different problems.
More seriously, though, they're great movies and I enjoyed them.
Can't help feeling though that some people come away with the wrong message: they think that mafia morality is how the world really works and so they must now embrace it.
Instead of noticing that Michael Corleone was trying to escape from it all and create a different life for his children. A life without the threats and violence.
(And then I think, hmm, perhaps mafia morality is still alive and well. It's merely that instead of being assassinated people are being deplatformed, disemployed, etc.)
If he wants us to work for our moral betterment ('Nobody does AI for our moral betterment') he's asking us become like old-fashioned saints or modern-day activists. But they are not problem-solvers per se. They act like they already have the solutions to our problems.
The irony is that, whatever the intentions of its creators, AGI probably will lead to our moral betterment by giving us a clearer understanding of what it means to be human.
That's hilarious. I've never noticed philosophers agreeing about anything.
One thing I would question is the necessity of having viewpoints at all about things which aren't connected to some problem in my life. I don't need to take a position about whether triangles are better than octagons, for instance, unless I'm trying to build something out of octagons. Sometimes opinions are necessary, e.g. a physician must make a diagnosis, but on the whole progress depends upon solving problems and not upon debating them. Furthermore, the best way to persuade others you have solved a problem is to ignore them and use your solution to make further progress.
Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.